An entire team based on the number of recorders in this picture! Well done to the Monitor's archive team for finding this lovely example of Racal's 'recorder-wall' at Barclays' treasury room in London. Yes, they really did stack them that high and yes it did cause problems. The average tape-changer needed to be 6'4" to comfortably handle the upper decks.
 Although Hollywood would probably present this scene as the nerve centre of CIA monitoring operations (machines with big reels always look good in the movies), we can tell you that this stuff has not been around for decades. For the technically interested, these appear to be ICR 64's which is a very rare beast indeed. ICR 64's normally used one primary deck backed up to a standby deck but we believe this was one of the first one to 'n' backup systems where there are three primaries linked to a single backup deck. This design was a bit risqué in those days, but you got a lot more bang-for-the-buck over the standard system so financially it made good sense.
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